"On the Road" to the "Postmodern"

In a perceptive and well-balanced article from the mid-1990's, Robert Holton examined Kerouac's appropriation of the Spenglerian notion of the "fellaheen" and concluded that

While a sense of racial alterity had long been a central topic of white American literature--examples from Freneau to Faulkner come to mind--one can argue that in Kerouac and the Beats a quite different manifestation of this American preoccupation appears. In Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road there is, on one hand, the expression of a radical desire to challenge the existing social order through a fore-grounding of the conventions and limitations of racial identity; and, on the other hand, there is a misrecognition of those conventions and limitations so profound as to justify the claim that ultimately On the Road legitimates as much as it challenges the master narratives that post-modernism seeks to undo.

[Robert Holton, "Kerouac Among the Fellahin: On The Road to the Postmodern" in Modern Fiction Studies 41:2 (1995: Summer), pp. 265-283].

I like to say that there are two kinds of white Americans (though one need not be white to fall into one or the other of these categories): racists and recovering racists. Kerouac seems to have been among the former at several points in his life and among the latter at other times. In this regard, his personal story is not all that exceptional. As Northrop Frye continually reminded us, artists are often unexceptional in many ways; Kerouac was an artist. We have no warrant to be surprised.

Rather, we should bear witness to his struggles with race and class and ideology as they found articulation in his life and his art and turn them to our own advantage: as opportunities to reflect upon our own struggles with race, class, and ideology.

By his stripes we may be healed.